Diary of a Disgruntled Waiter: Read This Before You Sit in My Section!

by admin on May 23, 2011

Diary of a Disgruntled Waiter

Read This Before You Sit in My Section!

Get the fuck out of my section. Don’t come out to eat in any restaurant I may work in on any given shift if you cannot grasp the basic of restaurant etiquette. What am I referring to, you ask? Let me explain me explain it in some standard guidelines to help you enhance your dining experience and not have a waiter hock a loogie into your French onion soup.

1.) Don’t come out to eat what you cannot afford.

If you have to ask the price of any and everything, you are in the wrong dining establishment. I’m sure there is a Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald’s who would be more than willing to take your hard earned cash and give you the service and food quality you obviously are accustomed to. With a dollar value menu, even your cheap ass can do the math without help from the minimum wage paid cashier. If you hurry, you might catch a buy-one-get-one-free at Sonic’s. For a limited time only.

2.) Do not order something you have never tried before as a main course.

That’s just fucking stupid. Not only do you have to wait for a new entrée to arrive to replace the one you already ordered and did not like, but now you have your friends eating around you while your stomach rumbles and you kick yourself (hard) for not going with your first choice of the chicken (not exactly the most original dish, but honestly, how can you fuck up chicken?).

Oh, but it gets worse…

Not only do you waste a perfectly good dish of food which/chefs/sous chefs/prep cooks have slaved to prepare for you, but now the entire kitchen comes to a grinding halt as the new item you ordered (Surprise! The chicken!) takes prevalence over the existing orders of the other diners, causing the entire restaurants food to come out late, all for little you. Stick to what you know or even better (ready?), try one of your friend’s plates who have ordered differently from you. To recap, stick to what you enjoy, not what you think you want to experiment with. This isn’t a science course.

3.) This one is primarily geared towards this new crop of bloggers/wanna-be critics/so-called “foodies” (we all eat food; I guess everyone’s a foodie):

Put down the goddamn camera and eat the food on the plate in front of you.

You cannot be that bored in life that you have now arrived at the point of absurdity, where you take great pride in photographing and cataloguing electronically the food that you ingest. Please say it isn’t so. Please tell me you are not blogging about how delicate the texture is on your sauté of Dover sole while you are seated with a fork in one hand and an IPhone in the other. Is your meal really that important that you must share it with the world between each bite of your crème brulee? Is it really that newsworthy? Did you take pictures of your mother’s meatloaf and post those as well? Come back to reality, all you New York Times critics in training. There are others highly qualified to lend their opinions on a restaurant’s cuisine to the world, and you my friend are not one of them. Eat the food on the plate in front of you!

4.) Lastly, tipping is not a city in China.

It is gratuities based on the waiter’s interaction with you. Not if your food is overcooked or your wait for food extends past the time you feel is normal. People’s livelihood depends on the money you pass on at the end of your meal; people with families, bills, childcare, credit cards just like you have. Anything less than 15% of your bill is unacceptable and outright disrespectful to the waiter/waitress who has the nerve-racking task of trying to decipher your gastronomic needs while maintaining an air of actual concern (in a nutshell: we don’t) for your time there. Please tip accordingly. If you think what you leave as a tip is a low amount or short, more than likely you are right. Add more. Now of course there are a majority of the waiters who don’t give a rat’s ass about their job or you, but for those who do, it’s obvious in the way you are treated and with the sincere and genuine nature in which they treat you and your guests. These are the ones who deserve more. If you still think tipping is a luxury not a necessity, please see Guideline #1 above. Cheap bastard/bitch.

If you cannot comply with these basic requests, please stay the fuck out of my section. I will only give you my ass to kiss and that foreign, insipid taste in your mouth after your first swallow of your margarita is just my special way of saying thank you for your patronage.